Page 45 of The Whisper Place
I could still feel her hand on my arm, the sharp bite of her sudden plea. As if I could dream about people on demand. As if my abilities were in any way under my control. I was an unconsenting voyeur to the worst moments of random victims’ lives, unable to do anything except watch as they thrashed and screamed or sank into the mire of their circumstances. Lost and hopeless, they didn’t know anyone saw them. I had no way of telling them I was there, that someone would be looking for them, and they weren’t alone.
And there was another reason I might not have dreamed about her. I never had nightmares about people who were already dead. Kate Campbell had a name now, but she might not have a pulse.
“She was telling the truth about the identity stuff,” I confirmed. “She’d told Kate to change her name and disappear. She didn’t want her daughter anywhere near the fallout zone.”
Max digested that as we came into an open area along a creek bed. The water was dark and stagnant, and the forest swallowed the sucking sound of our shoes in the mud. Twilight was settling in and it was getting harder and harder to see anything outside the beams from our phones. Somewhere behind us, a twig snapped.
“Would you do that?” Max asked.
“Which? Send someone I loved away to protect them or be the one who left?”
“Either.”
I had to breathe into the effort of separating myself from Valerie’s decisions and emotions. Draw the boundary and think about what lay on my side. The people in my life who mattered could be counted on one hand with fingers to spare. But it was still impossible to imagine. I couldn’t see Max or Eve doing anything I told them, regardless of their own safety. And I wouldn’t be able to stomach their self-sacrificing bullshit either. “I doubt it.”
He stood between a dead, uprooted tree and the water’s edge, staring at the black mirror of the creek. The sheen of his head was muted, turning hollow in the shadows and twisting half-light. I felt his answer before he said it.
“That’s what I was trying to do with the money from Kara. We needed it or we would’ve gone under, and I told myself we were doing good work, that the scales would balance in the end. By not telling you, I thought I was protecting you from the consequences, if it ever came to light.”
“You hear yourself, right?”
He sighed. “It was wrong and stupid. You can take a swing at me if it makes you feel better.”
He didn’t think I would, which made it more satisfying when I turned him around and punched him in the face. He stumbled and fell into the fallen tree, cursing as he tried to untangle himself from the dirt, moss, and rotting roots splayed into the air like an autopsy. I wished it was lighter so I could see the frustration and scrambling as clearly as I sensed it from the forest floor.
When he stopped struggling, I offered a hand. He paused before taking it and pulled himself out of the roots.
“We’re good,” I told him. “Don’t do it again.”
He clapped me on the shoulder and that was that.
He picked up his phone where he’d dropped it in the hole the fallen tree must’ve left in the forest floor. The flashlight made a wild arc as he straightened, knees popping like gunshots, and moved on. Something snagged in my brain, though—a dull warning. Somewhere deep in the woods a chorus of crows screamed at each other. I stopped walking, caught on the snag, the thing that wasn’t right.
Dread uncoiled in my gut as I retraced my steps and lifted my phone light to the trunk of the fallen tree. Underneath the base of the trunk, pulled up by the tug of earth, were a pair of stained, thick bones sticking out of the dirt.
“What is it?” Max was ten paces ahead, shining a tiny beam of light back at me.
“A grave.”
Kate
As soon as he walked into the bakery, I was seventeen years old again. The last seven years of my life—the escape, the townhouse, college, jobs, murder, Blake and Charlie—all fell away. I was a teenager on the verge of graduating high school and escaping the horror show my life had become. Everything would change, I thought, no matter if my mom ever left Ted or not. I could start fresh at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and reinvent who and what I was. I could become someone new. Maybe it would give Mom the courage to do the same.
The weekend before graduation, Ted came home in a rage because his job laid him off. His “incompetent manager” was moving his work to another department. Ted was already talking lawsuits and civil actions, storming around like the toddler he was and too far into the tantrum for even Mom to soothe him. She’d been baking bread and hovered at the edge of the room with a smear of dough on her shirt. She looked exhausted and wary and that, more than anything else, made me say it.
“Good for them. They should’ve fired you ages ago.”
Ted turned on me and I froze. Fury flooded his face, veins throbbing, pupils eating his eyes. I’d lived the last year and a half knowing with absolute certainty that no matter how bad things got, we hadn’t seen the worst of him yet. Looking at his face now, I knew. The worst was here.
I tried to run. He caught me before I made it two steps. The next thing I knew Mom put herself between us and screamed that she was done; she was leaving him. For a split second I was happy. I thought we could finally leave, together.
He didn’t shout back. He grabbed her by the throat, deadly calm, pulled her face close to his, and muttered as her cheeks turned red and then purple. “It’s over when I say it’s over.”
I threw myself at him, not even thinking to grab a knife or a pot, something I could use to hurt him. All I could see was the color bloating my mom’s face and the desperation in her eyes.
My attack surprised him. He released Mom and she stumbled back, coughing and gasping. Then she was there, all ninety pounds of her flying at him. He shoved me into the refrigerator, knocking the wind out of me, and pushed her into the pantry, slamming the door and moving the kitchen table against it to trap her inside. I crawled to the living room and grabbed my phone, calling 911, but as the call connected and the operator said, “What’s your emergency?” Ted pulled it out of my hands and ended the call before I could do more than gasp an oxygen-starved “Help—” into the receiver.
“What’s over,” he seethed as he dragged me by the back of my shirt and jerked me down the concrete steps to the unfinished basement, “is the disrespect I’ve put up with from you.”
